A.I has helped finish a long awaited final Beatles project, but now sparks the question if A.I gone too far?
On Nov. 2, The Beatles released their last song, “Now and Then” although John Lennon and George Harrison had passed away leaving only Ringo Starr and Sir Paul McCartney from the group. They used artificial intelligence to recreate John Lennon’s voice 50 years later. Using the technology, they had managed to restore and improve Lennon’s voice from an old cassette tape separating his voice from the piano in the tape and enhancing his voice from the cassette.
This is not the first time A.I has been used to make music, earlier this year a TikTok user had made and released a song called “Heart On My Sleeve” using A.I generated vocals from Drake and The Weeknd but was taken down by Universal Music Group. Recently, popular musician Bad Bunny voiced his discontent with his vocals being synthesized and used on an A.I song with the generated voices of Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee. Many artists are not happy about their voice and likeness being used to create music that they did not sing or have any involvement with. There are also artists who support people using their voice for music, Grimes, a musician from Canada, encourages people to use her voice. Grimes teamed up with CreateSafe, a music tech studio, to make the software Elf Tech that can be used to use Grimes’ vocals via A.I generation. It has been announced that any music to be released using Elf Tech must split royalties with Grimes if she approves the collaboration. Grimes will very likely not be the last artist to allow people to use their voice.
A.I generated music has caused many problems regarding if such music can be protected by copyright law. In an article by Harvard Law Today, they asked an intellectual property expert, Louis Tompros questions regarding how A.I generated music compared to other industry disrupting technologies like sampling, “With A.I., unlike sampling, you’re not just taking a piece, you’re taking the whole thing. The A.I. got a copy of the whole Drake oeuvre, the entire collection of Drake songs. But on the flip side, the output doesn’t include anything at all copied from the originals.”
Ultimately the world of A.I being used in the music industry is still in a gray area, there are those who believe that we should keep them away from each other and others who believe that we shouldn’t be afraid of it and be more open to use it in the industry.
